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The Yeah Yeah Yeahs catch a buzz with Mosquito: album review

It would have been nice to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs go over the top with 2009’s pointedly polished disco-pop opus It’s Blitz! if only because Karen O’s Dadaist sense of rock-star style rendered on a grand, Gaga-esque scale would no doubt have been plenty entertaining.

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In the end, though, despite the expert mainstream-baiting of “Heads Will Roll” and “Zero,” It’s Blitz! didn’t wind up messing with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ cult status as much as many figured (or feared) it would. And perhaps that’s just as it should be, because the New York City trio retreated to a Brooklyn basement and a lo-fi budget once again to make Mosquito and has emerged with a bent little slab of strangeness that smacks of renewed “we answer to nobody” self-indulgence and suggests the next great transformation is under way within the Yeah Yeah Yeahs camp.

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New Music: The latest from Yeah Yeah Yeahs(CP)

Under way, I say, because Mosquito isn’t quite the great album it could have been if its disparate parts flowed together just a little bit more smoothly. Perhaps disorientation is the point, but more than any of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ other three mercurial records this one shifts gears up and down with brazen disregard for cohesion. The eruptive gospel/R&B kicks of the smashing first single “Sacrilege” stage-dive rapidly into the comedown phase on “Subway” — a forlorn, almost-ambient late-night ride through the underground backboned with the sounds of clickety-clacking train tracks — before things crank up to manic with the high-kickin’ garage-punk foolishness of the title track and then abruptly plunge back into the abyss again on “Under the Earth,” wherein Karen O squawks “Down, down under the earth/Goes another lover” over a beastly death rattle of dub-shocked percussion, a coiling Bauhaus bass line and a mounting keyboard chorus of anxious, operatic vocals. On it goes similarly from there, alternating giddy highs such as “Area 52”’s preening invitation to “Take me, please, oh alien” and pronounced lows — the James Murphy-produced electro creepout “Buried Alive,” which features a guest rap from Kool Keith/Dr. Octagon, or the self-explanatory “Despair” — with only a minor uptick to bittersweet at the end of it all on “Wedding Song,” which Karen O sung at her own wedding recently but still oozes “Maps”-worthy melancholy.

Muddled, then, but still fascinating even when it doesn’t quite click. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs could yet stitch it all together into another classic album. Keep watching.

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